People

Cosmonauts - Nikolai
Budarin

Nikolai Budarin was a crew member on two Mir flights during the Shuttle-Mir
Program. The first was Mir 19, where he was the flight engineer on the Russian
crew that replaced Norm Thagard and his Mir-18 cosmonaut crewmates. He and Mir 19 Commander Anatoly
Solovyev launched to the Russian space station Mir aboard a Space Shuttle
on STS-71, marking the first time
a Mir crew was ferried to the station on an American spacecraft. Additionally,
Budarin commanded the Mir-25 mission, which lasted from January 29, 1998, until
August 25, 1998. He and Mir-25 Flight Engineer Talgat Musabayev worked with
two American astronauts on the space station, beginning with David Wolf. Wolf's
mission began with the launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on September 25,
1997, and ended when he returned to Earth on January 31, 1998. He was replaced
by Andrew Thomas, whose mission started with the launch of the Space Shuttle
Endeavour on January 22, 1998, and came to a close when he returned to Earth
on June 12, 1998.

Budarin received a mechanical engineering diploma from the S. Ordzhonikidze
Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979. He then joined NPO Energia where he was involved
in experimental investigations and the testing of space technology. In 1989,
Budarin enrolled as a candidate test cosmonaut, and he completed his training
in 1991. The pilot of STS-71, Charles Precourt, recalled in his Oral History
the initial language problems between the two: "So we had a forty-five-minute
drive to Galveston, and he didn't speak much English and I didn't speak much
Russian, but we were able to, with a dictionary, talk about a few things on
the way down there. You think about how the relationships started there and
where they've evolved to today, it's pretty incredible, because we couldn't
even talk to each other back then and now we do everything together. It's neat.
But, yes, when you think back on how it really first started, you would tend
to believe those that said, 'You'll never be able to make this work.' So the
fact that we did is pretty neat.